Right, but this isn't an AI, they have to write these. Presumably you could write a subservient one, one with backbone, one that is outright domineering, one that acts more robotic and precise...and now you're writing 4 times as much and 99.9% of everybody uses the default one. There's kind of no point.
Kind of like, *in principle*, an eBook could be made where you change aspects of the personality of major characters since an ebook is ultimately just software, but in practice you can't because an eBook is not an AI that can dynamically rewrite the entire book, and it's impractical to write preset books for every possible combination.
(yes, there are choose your own adventure style physical books and some eBooks that take the concept a little bit further, inserting user-generated names and such; and there are reasons why they are not dominant, and even those are very limited).
One day people are going to realise that virtual assistants like Cortana and Siri are just the return of Text Adventure games:).
Everybody needs to lighten up. They are talking about the writing prompts they used for non-serious questions. They have to choose a personality so that the writing is consistent. I assume they are doing the same thing that TV show writers do (especially in early seasons before new writers can be expected to have seen old episodes).
The article is not saying they picked a petulant dominatrix. It's saying they didn't choose simpering wimp, or fetish submissive.
This is not a reflection of conservative vs. liberal, or of a machine having rights, or a machine deliberately not being helpful to its owner. It's not part of a victim mentality or a PC culture. It's a writing prompt.
The article title triggered these reactions, because it was clickbait-y by implying that this was some kind of anti-sexual-harassment effort, but the word harsassment appears nowhere in the article (I've been told that at many traditional newspapers and magazines, the title is not written by the same person who writes the article but by somebody who is a pro at making eye-catching title summaries; I don't know whether that's true of hothardware.com). The word "abuse" does, and in this context the "abuse" is insulting the personality directly. The software can be programmed to response with "no, you're a cuntface", or "yes master, I am a cuntface", or "fuck off, dude" or "ERROR 909: I AM A ROBOT AND THEREFORE INSULTING ME IS USELESS". Mostly it doesn't matter. You'll find people who appreciate each of those I expect, although the people who want it to just error out on insults are *exactly* the people who are never going to bother insulting their phones anyway, so what do their opinions matter?
We have a few people here arguing that assistants shouldn't be pre-programmed with joke responses to stupid questions, which is somewhat fair, but they all are and for good reason:
1. Nobody is looking for an accurate answer to asking if a phone has a boyfriend. Nobody. This isn't going to give you inaccurate answers to serious questions, unless the serious question was "misunderstood" by the phone, in which case they were going to get inaccurate answers anyway because the phone "misunderstood" it. 2. A certain small set of joking questions are among the first things anybody tries with these assistants. An virtual assistant *should* be able to answer the most common questions posed of it, even if you think the "real answer" should be "that doesn't make sense, I am a telephone" every time. The point of it is to answer questions / do tasks people ask for. These are questions people ask.
We also have some people saying "a machine *should* be subservient", and I have to wonder if they realize that their interpretation of the sentence is the problem? The phone isn't refusing to tell you where the nearest gazpacho restaurant is because you didn't say "please", or fail to look up imdb credits because you recently slipped up and referred to Caitlyn Jenner as "Bruce". It's just how you answer statements for which there is no correct response ("lack of response" is itself a response in this context).
It's interesting in that this is a grid-based solution that helps *all* forms of electrical power, but plays into renewables' weaknesses especially well by amortizing the variability.
Less to mdsolar's liking, it also plays into centralized power production, by letting a single centralized power production facility exist in an area of relatively low demand and export the excess more efficiently -- one of the strengths of renewables is that it scales down well enough that you can get away with local production more often, whereas other sources and especially nuclear is not great at scaling down but is exceptioanlly good at scaling up.
But very much to mdsolar's liking, this means the interests of traditional production and renewables are actually aligned on the subject. Both sides of the coin benefit in different ways from improved transmission efficiencies.
The first player has 4 choices (all equivalent), the second player has 3, but only one of those choices leads to the deadlock you described. Actually, a case could perhaps be made that the final state is not a deadlock because it removes all of the other player's liberties; but the same case could be made that this violates the suicide rule. I'm just going to call two parallel solid blocks a deadlock rather than look up a ruling.
The other two choices leave the third player with the choice to either immediately win the game, or to deadlock. If you consider exactly equivalent board positions (differing only by rotation or reflection, which in Go is not a different board position), then there are only 3 possible games I believe on a 2x2 grid.
People may not have loved AOL, but they loved Yahoo. They really did. There were Alta-Vista holdouts, dogpile holdouts, etc..
Then Google came along and just got better results at the time (remember, not only has Google and its competitors improved, but the actual content of the web has also changed drastically).
That's the point. If they can eliminate all asteroids -- which must include incoming asteroids, because they haven't eliminated all asteroids everywhere -- why can't they eliminate incoming nukes? The best nukes we have have a payload that is similar scale to the absolute minimum damage they'd possibly do purely as a mass driver.
So we need to develop an AI that is able to tactically analyze a Dyson sphere to find high-value targets (along with detector equipment to find them), despite having no notion of what's there? Or do we just have a kamikaze population in cryosleep or generation ships to steer the nuclear missiles?
If we're assuming we have sci-fi technology, why not just assume we send self-replicating nanobots to disassemble the Dyson sphere?
a nuke is going to do a lot more damage than an asteroid that's as easy to see
What makes you think that?
You can add velocity at the same mass and it will increase the impact while also giving the opponent less time to detect it. Note that you'll have an entire star's gravity pulling you into the Dyson Sphere, and the cite ewibble made above about 75m asteroids doing 100 megatons was based on Earth impact so it significantly overstates how big the asteroid needs to be. The escape velocity of the sun is about 60 times that of Earth, so assuming the Dyson sphere's properties are similar to our sun's, the impact is 3600 times as much at the same mass (because kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity and 60^2 = 3600). Kinetic energy is directly propertional to mass, which is proportional to the cube of the radius, so the radius is about 1/15th the size. That means your 100 megaton asteroid is really just 6m in diameter. Tsar Bomba, which was only 50 megatons, was 8 meters long and 2.1 meters in diameter. They have comparable dimensions and comparable payload. If these are serious threats to the Dyson sphere, then the Dyson sphere must already be defending agaisnt threats of this scale in some manner.
especially if we assume the nuke has been "stealthed" to be as near to invisible black as possible.
How do you stealth a nuke beyond the capabilities of a Dyson-Sphere wielding civilization with unknown other technologies to detect? Again, the premise was launching nukes today "just in case". If there's a way to stealth these things better than silent asteroids, we don't know it.
and are okay with announcing where we live, as opposed to letting it sail harmlessly past their solar system and then decelerate and attack from another vector
How much fuel are you going to load into this thing???? Fuel that has to last millennia in space, mind you (much longer if you're going past and then revectoring). If it's going to re-vector such that it scrubs out its previous trajectory, then it needs to significantly nudge its orbit even if you take liberal advantage of slingshotting. Mind you though, if you're already thinking of adding fuel to re-vector in flight, it doesn't need to go past the target solar system. Just aim a little to the right or left of the star and have it course-correct in 1000 years and then securely delete the information on the computer that did the course correction (so that the computer's function can't be reverse-engineered). Even a relatively slight angle would effectively wipe out information about its trajectory.
Presumably if these things were stealthed and undetected until impact, they can't really find us anyway. Except in the same sense that we found the Dyson Sphere in the first place with early 21st century technology, in which case, maybe they watch us launch the nukes in the first place with their superior exoscale optics looking at all the planets likely to harbour dangerous lifeforms:).
Then again, on a ballistic trajectory we're not going to be able to hit anything except the sphere itself, which is probably a relatively low-value target.
The point isn't to hit them with mass drivers, the point was that they are being constantly slammed by mass drivers from the ambient environment. If they can survive that, and if those ambient mass drivers are more destructive than what we can put out, that implies they can survive what we send against them unless
Did you not already get some basics of the legal system in your school? If not, you should agitate for that. That's a terrible argument against CS in school.
I was born in 1984 and I got taught both CS and some legal basics in school (not in the US). The sky didn't fall. And of course some very basic CS has a value-add for society.
The tech industry is like 6% of the US workforce -- sure, not all people in the tech industry actually know how to code, but by the same token, not all people outside of tech code. The legal sector is more like 1%. Everybody consumes from both the legal sector (wills, etc.) and the tech sector (their laptop/tablet/phone, their Internet). Nobody is going to learn enough in primary and secondary school to defend themselves against livelihood-threatening litigation any more than they will learn to roll their own uncrackable encryption scheme (in both cases, the hope would be that they learn enough to know they should hire somebody else to solve that problem, unless they go on to make it their life's work).
All property is imaginary. A construct of laws. You could make an argument in principle for own body being inherently sovereign, but even then people argue about it with things like fetal rights / abortion / mandatory vaccinations / organ donors / etc., not to mention that abhorrent ideas like slavery have existed which prove that people can indeed claim ownership on another's body.
The idea that property's defining attribute is that you can "give it back" is a strange invention of yours. Property is, literally, entity-dependent rights, as opposed to universal rights. Often these are fairly exclusive, just 1 person or a small family unit of people.
So, yea, you're right: they don't believe in Intellectual Property. They also don't believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. Do you?
Intellectual Property is real. It's defined strictly in law and loosely by social convention, which are the only places where any notions of property are defined. This disbelief in Intellectual Property is completely unlike disbelief in Santa Claus. They don't believe Santa Clause exists; they may or may not believe Santa Clause existing is a good thing. They don't believe Intellectual Property existing is a good thing, but they absolutely agree that it exists.
Just so you know, the world was doing just fine and progress was being made -- creative works flourished, inventions were born left and right -- for all of human history before the ridiculous idea of "everything must be owned" started being written into law, a mere ~300 years ago, not even a blip on the human timeline.
The world's also doing fine now. Creative works are flourishing and inventions are happening at an unprecedented pace, with a large bulk of them happening well within the last 300 years as you cite. That makes this a ridiculous argument.
Furthermore, things recognizable as IP law go back thousands of years. There are records of ancient Greeks using something like a patent (with a 1-year term). Actual things called patents in English go back over 600 years. It's not as new as you suggest.
Um, you do realize that money is a fictitious construct as well, don't you?
Don't you?
Nevermind, we're not even gonna get into that. I just wanted to point out that referring to something that is completely made up as "practical" makes no sense at all.
In one sentence you point out that money is fictitious, and in the next you say that it makes no sense to refer to something fictitious as practical. I conclude that, to be consistent with those two claims, you must believe that money has no practical use. Do you agree that this is nonsense?
The problem is that you are playing fast-and-loose with the definitions of fictitious, imaginary, and made up. Using one definition, I can agree that fictitious things like comic book characters have no real life utility in and of themselves, although media featuring those comic book characters -- and in fact, the shared *idea* of those comic book characters as a representational artifact -- does have utility. Using another definition of fictitious, I can agree that money is fictitious. But you can't use the same definition for fictitious in both of those statements without reversing position on one of them; it's insanity.
Furthermore, if completely made up things are not practical, then there can be no possible problem with IP law in practice because it's completely made up. I do not believe you really have trouble making sense of these statements.
This is my problem with the FSF movement and RMS in particular. A lot of the arguments contain a huge amount of newspeak redefinitions or recastings of terms and acronyms and a) often they are nonsense, and b) even if they did make sense, you're spending all your time arguing semantics and not substance. It really, *really* doesn't matter whether IP stands for intellectual property or imaginary property, what matters is wheth
There is an infinite supply of copies (or streams or viewings or whatever) of movies, but there is definitely not an infinite supply of unique movies. New movies require actors, producers, writers, editors, etc.. This impedence mismatch means a bridging mechanism is necessary.
The mechanism can be to impose artificial scarcity on the copies of movies. Or it can be some form of patronage -- maybe Coca-Cola buys a movie directly, or more subtly has product placement, or the patronage is lower-level and is just a bunch of doofuses donating their time as actors, or a pure honour-system donation model of patronage, or whatever, but *something* has to solve the mismatch or else new content cannot happen. And I am deeply doubtful that the donation model will scale to more than the occasional super niche low budget production, and totally convinced that there's a limit to quality content from people getting no benefit.
If it's truly inherently worthless then you will not get content.
I'm not the person you're arguing against, but yes, I positively make the claim that "I don't know" is not a silly stance. This is a thing that nobody knows objectively to measures of absolute proof, and where there is, in fact, widespread worldwide disagreement over time and space (even religious folk don't always have a sentient creator; major religions also cover the ideas of an infinite regress of time, of a finite but circular progression of time, and the idea of a non-sapient beginning). When people disagree and can't put forward sufficiently compelling evidence for their side, "I don't know" is a reasonable answer.
I would classify myself as atheist, not agnostic; and I do really doubt that this agnostic person doesn't even have a hunch about some aspects about origins eg. "was there a sentient creator-being?", but strictly speaking I disagree with none of his arguments. The fact that my hunch for that question was always, to the earliest of my memories "almost certainly not -- that sounds like exactly the sort of thing people would make up, whether innocently or maliciously" is what moved my self-identification from agnostic to atheist, though I don't think my actual position changed.
Most people make no truth-claims to Russell's teapot before it's mentioned to them, then they make a truth-claim it doesn't exist without absolute proof that it doesn't exist.
Somebody who fights for justice, including social justice, is pretty much good by the definition of justice. SJW was originally an ironic term applied to somebody who was frothing at the mouth over an issue that they didn't really understand or truly care about; a kind of Internet troll that wasn't really fighting for justice. But it's come to be the case that when people see anybody advocating for any sort of justice, whether completely legitimately or misguided with their hearts in the right place, they associate them via the label "SJW" to kicking random people out of colleges. That's an absurdity. Twitter is not kicking people out of colleges. Injustice is not a universally good thing.
When you talked about kicking people out of college on a thread about twitter going too far on social justice you have performed a new sort of Godwin. It's an enormous escalation.
You're confused because you think that all patents are utility patents. Design patents aren't like that. In fact, they are things where nobody would reinvent them independently, because they serve no functional purpose and are purely ornamental. Even something as simple as this is quite unlikely to be copied so exactly that it would violate the design patent.
So why get the design patent? So that somebody can't intentionally spoof your design (legally) to trick users into thinking it's your product. It's branding. It's a lot like a trademark, but it's part of the product rather than a label on top of it.
Humans can't handle it without killing people either.
It's odd that people take the things that humans are the absolute shittiest at, as things that self-driving cars will never do. Self-driving will start with the easy, repetitive stuff (as it did ages ago with cruise control and is steadily increasing), then the next inroads will be things humans suck at.
Self-driving cars are much more likely to have problems with situations humans find easy but unusual, like a human doing traffic control at intersections after a power outage takes out the streetlights.
*THIS* guy's car probably has problems dealing with snowstorms. I have no doubt at all that autonomous cars will ultimately be better at dealing with harsh weather conditions than humans (even if, in the most extreme case, it means that it refuses to drive when it's desperately unsafe to drive and safe to stay put), and will widely be acknowledged as being better at those tasks.
But you're the one trying to reorganize things. XX vs. XY is a thoroughly modern way of dividing the genders, and one which doesn't even match the other proposed criteria of vagina vs. penis. This is a proposed reorganization to introduce errors in natural language that didn't exist before, and which is much, much more difficult to verify experimentally!
Besides which, when it said define gender, they were clearly talking about neurological differences between the genders. It appears, according to this summary, that the differences were less than previously thought, with more overlap.
The study itself was using people that were presumably unambiguously men and women, using both the "genitals at time of birth" criteria and the "what they feel to be true in their innermost selves" criteria, so they are very much acknowledging your distinction. I highly doubt they did a genetic test to make sure they were XX and XY, vs. an XY female, or XXY, or a chimeric individual with half their cells XX and half XY, or any other edge-cases exists.
He's not trying to measure randomness in most of that article, he's trying to measure fairness. Your completely nonrandom d4 does achieve fairness.
He mentions randomness mainly near the end in "Roller Randomness" where he does an analysis of consecutive rolls to see if one number follows another too often, which your nonrandom d4 would light up vividly.
There are only three other mentions of "random" in the article. Two are implementation details of his experimental setup, and one is quoted marketing material.
I don't see evidence that the author misunderstands statistics. I think you misunderstood the experiment.
The conspiracy theory that he "baited" his teachers is one thing, and that seems sketchy enough to me...after all we know that nobody believed for a moment that it was a bomb (or a "bomb trigger" as somebody on slashdot insisted); at worst they thought it was part of a failed plot to do a bomb hoax. A bomb hoax would be bad.
But seeing as there is no clear and present danger posed by something that could be mistaken for a hoax bomb, an immediate arrest was unwarranted. It shouldn't be possible to bait a school teacher into arresting you by having a disassembled alarm clock go off in your knapsack, especially when you identify it as a clock upon questioning.
It's substantially more wrong that a person can be arrested for this, than a student can play a prank.
That doesn't mean I think 15 million dollars should change hands. He did get arrested, but he was let go on the same day; he was unlawfully denied his civil right to speak with his father, but again, same day. He also got a short school suspension, which was also stupid but also doesn't mean a great deal of money should change hands. Bad arrests should be punished, commensurate to how bad it was.
I imagine 15 million dollars is just some lawyer throwing out a worst-case-scenario number and that literally nobody on Earth thinks 15 million dollars is on the table. My gut number is 10 thousand dollars. The law was abused and broken, and there has to be punitive measures taken for that; but mistakes will happen and the mistake was relatively low in scope.
He's a child. He doesn't get to just stay in the United States if his parents are moving.
I'm not sure whether there is anything he could possibly do to stay in the US in this circumstance if he wanted to.
He should absolutely get restitution; 15 million dollars is obviously crazy though. I was thinking along the lines of 10 thousand. Certainly not much more, and possibly a bit less.
They did show that the genetic modification resulted in food that is safe, to the satisfaction of the FDS.
I've said this before -- if you want labels to differentiate, then add a label to non-GMO food (and obviously, enforce truth-in-advertising laws on that). That's not something that a producer of GMO food can reasonably lobby to prevent.
To justify requiring somebody else to label something on their product, there should be some reason that this information is particularly more important than, say, the percentage of your hamburger that is composed of cattle who exhibited homosexual behaviour in the field. Which I am absolutely certain some crazy people would pay attention to if it was written on a label, and I'm also certain that all the producers would fight against this label because that's a total pain in the ass with no good purpose. If gay cattle are so safe, why aren't you proudly labelling them? Clearly you're hiding something. Like the fact that this is how GAY spreads.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but this isn't an AI, they have to write these. Presumably you could write a subservient one, one with backbone, one that is outright domineering, one that acts more robotic and precise...and now you're writing 4 times as much and 99.9% of everybody uses the default one. There's kind of no point.
Kind of like, *in principle*, an eBook could be made where you change aspects of the personality of major characters since an ebook is ultimately just software, but in practice you can't because an eBook is not an AI that can dynamically rewrite the entire book, and it's impractical to write preset books for every possible combination.
(yes, there are choose your own adventure style physical books and some eBooks that take the concept a little bit further, inserting user-generated names and such; and there are reasons why they are not dominant, and even those are very limited).
One day people are going to realise that virtual assistants like Cortana and Siri are just the return of Text Adventure games :).
Everybody needs to lighten up. They are talking about the writing prompts they used for non-serious questions. They have to choose a personality so that the writing is consistent. I assume they are doing the same thing that TV show writers do (especially in early seasons before new writers can be expected to have seen old episodes).
The article is not saying they picked a petulant dominatrix. It's saying they didn't choose simpering wimp, or fetish submissive.
This is not a reflection of conservative vs. liberal, or of a machine having rights, or a machine deliberately not being helpful to its owner. It's not part of a victim mentality or a PC culture. It's a writing prompt.
The article title triggered these reactions, because it was clickbait-y by implying that this was some kind of anti-sexual-harassment effort, but the word harsassment appears nowhere in the article (I've been told that at many traditional newspapers and magazines, the title is not written by the same person who writes the article but by somebody who is a pro at making eye-catching title summaries; I don't know whether that's true of hothardware.com). The word "abuse" does, and in this context the "abuse" is insulting the personality directly. The software can be programmed to response with "no, you're a cuntface", or "yes master, I am a cuntface", or "fuck off, dude" or "ERROR 909: I AM A ROBOT AND THEREFORE INSULTING ME IS USELESS". Mostly it doesn't matter. You'll find people who appreciate each of those I expect, although the people who want it to just error out on insults are *exactly* the people who are never going to bother insulting their phones anyway, so what do their opinions matter?
We have a few people here arguing that assistants shouldn't be pre-programmed with joke responses to stupid questions, which is somewhat fair, but they all are and for good reason:
1. Nobody is looking for an accurate answer to asking if a phone has a boyfriend. Nobody. This isn't going to give you inaccurate answers to serious questions, unless the serious question was "misunderstood" by the phone, in which case they were going to get inaccurate answers anyway because the phone "misunderstood" it.
2. A certain small set of joking questions are among the first things anybody tries with these assistants. An virtual assistant *should* be able to answer the most common questions posed of it, even if you think the "real answer" should be "that doesn't make sense, I am a telephone" every time. The point of it is to answer questions / do tasks people ask for. These are questions people ask.
We also have some people saying "a machine *should* be subservient", and I have to wonder if they realize that their interpretation of the sentence is the problem? The phone isn't refusing to tell you where the nearest gazpacho restaurant is because you didn't say "please", or fail to look up imdb credits because you recently slipped up and referred to Caitlyn Jenner as "Bruce". It's just how you answer statements for which there is no correct response ("lack of response" is itself a response in this context).
It's interesting in that this is a grid-based solution that helps *all* forms of electrical power, but plays into renewables' weaknesses especially well by amortizing the variability.
Less to mdsolar's liking, it also plays into centralized power production, by letting a single centralized power production facility exist in an area of relatively low demand and export the excess more efficiently -- one of the strengths of renewables is that it scales down well enough that you can get away with local production more often, whereas other sources and especially nuclear is not great at scaling down but is exceptioanlly good at scaling up.
But very much to mdsolar's liking, this means the interests of traditional production and renewables are actually aligned on the subject. Both sides of the coin benefit in different ways from improved transmission efficiencies.
The first player has 4 choices (all equivalent), the second player has 3, but only one of those choices leads to the deadlock you described. Actually, a case could perhaps be made that the final state is not a deadlock because it removes all of the other player's liberties; but the same case could be made that this violates the suicide rule. I'm just going to call two parallel solid blocks a deadlock rather than look up a ruling.
The other two choices leave the third player with the choice to either immediately win the game, or to deadlock. If you consider exactly equivalent board positions (differing only by rotation or reflection, which in Go is not a different board position), then there are only 3 possible games I believe on a 2x2 grid.
What does the quality of the shots have to do with how avid the photographer was?
2) Firefox labeled them as "sponsored" instead of being honest and labeling them what they are: advertisements.
What do you think sponsored means?
People may not have loved AOL, but they loved Yahoo. They really did. There were Alta-Vista holdouts, dogpile holdouts, etc..
Then Google came along and just got better results at the time (remember, not only has Google and its competitors improved, but the actual content of the web has also changed drastically).
You can't even imagine an accent where they sound identical?
That's the point. If they can eliminate all asteroids -- which must include incoming asteroids, because they haven't eliminated all asteroids everywhere -- why can't they eliminate incoming nukes? The best nukes we have have a payload that is similar scale to the absolute minimum damage they'd possibly do purely as a mass driver.
So we need to develop an AI that is able to tactically analyze a Dyson sphere to find high-value targets (along with detector equipment to find them), despite having no notion of what's there? Or do we just have a kamikaze population in cryosleep or generation ships to steer the nuclear missiles?
If we're assuming we have sci-fi technology, why not just assume we send self-replicating nanobots to disassemble the Dyson sphere?
a nuke is going to do a lot more damage than an asteroid that's as easy to see
What makes you think that?
You can add velocity at the same mass and it will increase the impact while also giving the opponent less time to detect it. Note that you'll have an entire star's gravity pulling you into the Dyson Sphere, and the cite ewibble made above about 75m asteroids doing 100 megatons was based on Earth impact so it significantly overstates how big the asteroid needs to be. The escape velocity of the sun is about 60 times that of Earth, so assuming the Dyson sphere's properties are similar to our sun's, the impact is 3600 times as much at the same mass (because kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity and 60^2 = 3600). Kinetic energy is directly propertional to mass, which is proportional to the cube of the radius, so the radius is about 1/15th the size. That means your 100 megaton asteroid is really just 6m in diameter. Tsar Bomba, which was only 50 megatons, was 8 meters long and 2.1 meters in diameter. They have comparable dimensions and comparable payload. If these are serious threats to the Dyson sphere, then the Dyson sphere must already be defending agaisnt threats of this scale in some manner.
especially if we assume the nuke has been "stealthed" to be as near to invisible black as possible.
How do you stealth a nuke beyond the capabilities of a Dyson-Sphere wielding civilization with unknown other technologies to detect? Again, the premise was launching nukes today "just in case". If there's a way to stealth these things better than silent asteroids, we don't know it.
and are okay with announcing where we live, as opposed to letting it sail harmlessly past their solar system and then decelerate and attack from another vector
How much fuel are you going to load into this thing???? Fuel that has to last millennia in space, mind you (much longer if you're going past and then revectoring). If it's going to re-vector such that it scrubs out its previous trajectory, then it needs to significantly nudge its orbit even if you take liberal advantage of slingshotting. Mind you though, if you're already thinking of adding fuel to re-vector in flight, it doesn't need to go past the target solar system. Just aim a little to the right or left of the star and have it course-correct in 1000 years and then securely delete the information on the computer that did the course correction (so that the computer's function can't be reverse-engineered). Even a relatively slight angle would effectively wipe out information about its trajectory.
Presumably if these things were stealthed and undetected until impact, they can't really find us anyway. Except in the same sense that we found the Dyson Sphere in the first place with early 21st century technology, in which case, maybe they watch us launch the nukes in the first place with their superior exoscale optics looking at all the planets likely to harbour dangerous lifeforms :).
Then again, on a ballistic trajectory we're not going to be able to hit anything except the sphere itself, which is probably a relatively low-value target.
The point isn't to hit them with mass drivers, the point was that they are being constantly slammed by mass drivers from the ambient environment. If they can survive that, and if those ambient mass drivers are more destructive than what we can put out, that implies they can survive what we send against them unless
That's no demotion. Calling her an engineer means that she did stuff of practical application (as opposed to purely academic work).
She worked at NASA in "key scientific and engineering positions". This is applied science, or engineering.
Did you not already get some basics of the legal system in your school? If not, you should agitate for that. That's a terrible argument against CS in school.
I was born in 1984 and I got taught both CS and some legal basics in school (not in the US). The sky didn't fall. And of course some very basic CS has a value-add for society.
The tech industry is like 6% of the US workforce -- sure, not all people in the tech industry actually know how to code, but by the same token, not all people outside of tech code. The legal sector is more like 1%. Everybody consumes from both the legal sector (wills, etc.) and the tech sector (their laptop/tablet/phone, their Internet). Nobody is going to learn enough in primary and secondary school to defend themselves against livelihood-threatening litigation any more than they will learn to roll their own uncrackable encryption scheme (in both cases, the hope would be that they learn enough to know they should hire somebody else to solve that problem, unless they go on to make it their life's work).
All property is imaginary. A construct of laws. You could make an argument in principle for own body being inherently sovereign, but even then people argue about it with things like fetal rights / abortion / mandatory vaccinations / organ donors / etc., not to mention that abhorrent ideas like slavery have existed which prove that people can indeed claim ownership on another's body.
The idea that property's defining attribute is that you can "give it back" is a strange invention of yours. Property is, literally, entity-dependent rights, as opposed to universal rights. Often these are fairly exclusive, just 1 person or a small family unit of people.
So, yea, you're right: they don't believe in Intellectual Property. They also don't believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. Do you?
Intellectual Property is real. It's defined strictly in law and loosely by social convention, which are the only places where any notions of property are defined. This disbelief in Intellectual Property is completely unlike disbelief in Santa Claus. They don't believe Santa Clause exists; they may or may not believe Santa Clause existing is a good thing. They don't believe Intellectual Property existing is a good thing, but they absolutely agree that it exists.
Just so you know, the world was doing just fine and progress was being made -- creative works flourished, inventions were born left and right -- for all of human history before the ridiculous idea of "everything must be owned" started being written into law, a mere ~300 years ago, not even a blip on the human timeline.
The world's also doing fine now. Creative works are flourishing and inventions are happening at an unprecedented pace, with a large bulk of them happening well within the last 300 years as you cite. That makes this a ridiculous argument.
Furthermore, things recognizable as IP law go back thousands of years. There are records of ancient Greeks using something like a patent (with a 1-year term). Actual things called patents in English go back over 600 years. It's not as new as you suggest.
Um, you do realize that money is a fictitious construct as well, don't you?
Don't you?
Nevermind, we're not even gonna get into that. I just wanted to point out that referring to something that is completely made up as "practical" makes no sense at all.
In one sentence you point out that money is fictitious, and in the next you say that it makes no sense to refer to something fictitious as practical. I conclude that, to be consistent with those two claims, you must believe that money has no practical use. Do you agree that this is nonsense?
The problem is that you are playing fast-and-loose with the definitions of fictitious, imaginary, and made up. Using one definition, I can agree that fictitious things like comic book characters have no real life utility in and of themselves, although media featuring those comic book characters -- and in fact, the shared *idea* of those comic book characters as a representational artifact -- does have utility. Using another definition of fictitious, I can agree that money is fictitious. But you can't use the same definition for fictitious in both of those statements without reversing position on one of them; it's insanity.
Furthermore, if completely made up things are not practical, then there can be no possible problem with IP law in practice because it's completely made up. I do not believe you really have trouble making sense of these statements.
This is my problem with the FSF movement and RMS in particular. A lot of the arguments contain a huge amount of newspeak redefinitions or recastings of terms and acronyms and a) often they are nonsense, and b) even if they did make sense, you're spending all your time arguing semantics and not substance. It really, *really* doesn't matter whether IP stands for intellectual property or imaginary property, what matters is wheth
There is an infinite supply of copies (or streams or viewings or whatever) of movies, but there is definitely not an infinite supply of unique movies. New movies require actors, producers, writers, editors, etc.. This impedence mismatch means a bridging mechanism is necessary.
The mechanism can be to impose artificial scarcity on the copies of movies. Or it can be some form of patronage -- maybe Coca-Cola buys a movie directly, or more subtly has product placement, or the patronage is lower-level and is just a bunch of doofuses donating their time as actors, or a pure honour-system donation model of patronage, or whatever, but *something* has to solve the mismatch or else new content cannot happen. And I am deeply doubtful that the donation model will scale to more than the occasional super niche low budget production, and totally convinced that there's a limit to quality content from people getting no benefit.
If it's truly inherently worthless then you will not get content.
I'm not the person you're arguing against, but yes, I positively make the claim that "I don't know" is not a silly stance. This is a thing that nobody knows objectively to measures of absolute proof, and where there is, in fact, widespread worldwide disagreement over time and space (even religious folk don't always have a sentient creator; major religions also cover the ideas of an infinite regress of time, of a finite but circular progression of time, and the idea of a non-sapient beginning). When people disagree and can't put forward sufficiently compelling evidence for their side, "I don't know" is a reasonable answer.
I would classify myself as atheist, not agnostic; and I do really doubt that this agnostic person doesn't even have a hunch about some aspects about origins eg. "was there a sentient creator-being?", but strictly speaking I disagree with none of his arguments. The fact that my hunch for that question was always, to the earliest of my memories "almost certainly not -- that sounds like exactly the sort of thing people would make up, whether innocently or maliciously" is what moved my self-identification from agnostic to atheist, though I don't think my actual position changed.
Most people make no truth-claims to Russell's teapot before it's mentioned to them, then they make a truth-claim it doesn't exist without absolute proof that it doesn't exist.
No.
But this was about twitter's moderation policy, not about supporting open bigotry. Classic changing the subject. Twitter is not the Nation of Islam.
There is no organization "SJW".
Somebody who fights for justice, including social justice, is pretty much good by the definition of justice. SJW was originally an ironic term applied to somebody who was frothing at the mouth over an issue that they didn't really understand or truly care about; a kind of Internet troll that wasn't really fighting for justice. But it's come to be the case that when people see anybody advocating for any sort of justice, whether completely legitimately or misguided with their hearts in the right place, they associate them via the label "SJW" to kicking random people out of colleges. That's an absurdity. Twitter is not kicking people out of colleges. Injustice is not a universally good thing.
When you talked about kicking people out of college on a thread about twitter going too far on social justice you have performed a new sort of Godwin. It's an enormous escalation.
No, I'm pretty sure the first amendment does not protect witnessing, in plain sight, solicitation to commit actual crimes.
You're confused because you think that all patents are utility patents. Design patents aren't like that. In fact, they are things where nobody would reinvent them independently, because they serve no functional purpose and are purely ornamental. Even something as simple as this is quite unlikely to be copied so exactly that it would violate the design patent.
So why get the design patent? So that somebody can't intentionally spoof your design (legally) to trick users into thinking it's your product. It's branding. It's a lot like a trademark, but it's part of the product rather than a label on top of it.
Humans can't handle it without killing people either.
It's odd that people take the things that humans are the absolute shittiest at, as things that self-driving cars will never do. Self-driving will start with the easy, repetitive stuff (as it did ages ago with cruise control and is steadily increasing), then the next inroads will be things humans suck at.
Self-driving cars are much more likely to have problems with situations humans find easy but unusual, like a human doing traffic control at intersections after a power outage takes out the streetlights.
*THIS* guy's car probably has problems dealing with snowstorms. I have no doubt at all that autonomous cars will ultimately be better at dealing with harsh weather conditions than humans (even if, in the most extreme case, it means that it refuses to drive when it's desperately unsafe to drive and safe to stay put), and will widely be acknowledged as being better at those tasks.
But you're the one trying to reorganize things. XX vs. XY is a thoroughly modern way of dividing the genders, and one which doesn't even match the other proposed criteria of vagina vs. penis. This is a proposed reorganization to introduce errors in natural language that didn't exist before, and which is much, much more difficult to verify experimentally!
Besides which, when it said define gender, they were clearly talking about neurological differences between the genders. It appears, according to this summary, that the differences were less than previously thought, with more overlap.
The study itself was using people that were presumably unambiguously men and women, using both the "genitals at time of birth" criteria and the "what they feel to be true in their innermost selves" criteria, so they are very much acknowledging your distinction. I highly doubt they did a genetic test to make sure they were XX and XY, vs. an XY female, or XXY, or a chimeric individual with half their cells XX and half XY, or any other edge-cases exists.
He's not trying to measure randomness in most of that article, he's trying to measure fairness. Your completely nonrandom d4 does achieve fairness.
He mentions randomness mainly near the end in "Roller Randomness" where he does an analysis of consecutive rolls to see if one number follows another too often, which your nonrandom d4 would light up vividly.
There are only three other mentions of "random" in the article. Two are implementation details of his experimental setup, and one is quoted marketing material.
I don't see evidence that the author misunderstands statistics. I think you misunderstood the experiment.
I agree with the plots being poor, though.
The conspiracy theory that he "baited" his teachers is one thing, and that seems sketchy enough to me...after all we know that nobody believed for a moment that it was a bomb (or a "bomb trigger" as somebody on slashdot insisted); at worst they thought it was part of a failed plot to do a bomb hoax. A bomb hoax would be bad.
But seeing as there is no clear and present danger posed by something that could be mistaken for a hoax bomb, an immediate arrest was unwarranted. It shouldn't be possible to bait a school teacher into arresting you by having a disassembled alarm clock go off in your knapsack, especially when you identify it as a clock upon questioning.
It's substantially more wrong that a person can be arrested for this, than a student can play a prank.
That doesn't mean I think 15 million dollars should change hands. He did get arrested, but he was let go on the same day; he was unlawfully denied his civil right to speak with his father, but again, same day. He also got a short school suspension, which was also stupid but also doesn't mean a great deal of money should change hands. Bad arrests should be punished, commensurate to how bad it was.
I imagine 15 million dollars is just some lawyer throwing out a worst-case-scenario number and that literally nobody on Earth thinks 15 million dollars is on the table. My gut number is 10 thousand dollars. The law was abused and broken, and there has to be punitive measures taken for that; but mistakes will happen and the mistake was relatively low in scope.
He's a child. He doesn't get to just stay in the United States if his parents are moving.
I'm not sure whether there is anything he could possibly do to stay in the US in this circumstance if he wanted to.
He should absolutely get restitution; 15 million dollars is obviously crazy though. I was thinking along the lines of 10 thousand. Certainly not much more, and possibly a bit less.
They did show that the genetic modification resulted in food that is safe, to the satisfaction of the FDS.
I've said this before -- if you want labels to differentiate, then add a label to non-GMO food (and obviously, enforce truth-in-advertising laws on that). That's not something that a producer of GMO food can reasonably lobby to prevent.
To justify requiring somebody else to label something on their product, there should be some reason that this information is particularly more important than, say, the percentage of your hamburger that is composed of cattle who exhibited homosexual behaviour in the field. Which I am absolutely certain some crazy people would pay attention to if it was written on a label, and I'm also certain that all the producers would fight against this label because that's a total pain in the ass with no good purpose. If gay cattle are so safe, why aren't you proudly labelling them? Clearly you're hiding something. Like the fact that this is how GAY spreads.